The spread of infectious diseases has been a public concern throughout human history. Historic recorded data has reported the severity of infectious disease epidemics in different ages. Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates was the first to analyze the correlation between diseases and their environment. Nowadays, health authorities are in charge of planning strategies that guarantee the welfare of citizens. The simulation of contagion scenarios contributes to the understanding of the epidemic behavior of diseases. Computational models facilitate the study of epidemics by integrating disease and population data to the simulation. The use of detailed demographic and geographic characteristics allows researchers to construct complex models that better resemble reality and the integration of these attributes permits us to understand the rules of interaction. The interaction of individuals with similar characteristics forms synthetic structures that depict clusters of interaction. The synthetic environments facilitate the study of the spread of infectious diseases in diverse scenarios. The characteristics of the population and the disease concurrently affect the local and global epidemic progression. Every cluster’ epidemic behavior constitutes the global epidemic for a clustered population. By understanding the correlation between structured populations and the spread of a disease, current dissertation research makes possible to identify risk …

The outbreak of the Ebola virus was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Due to the complex nature of the outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had created interim guidance for monitoring people potentially exposed to Ebola and for evaluating their intended travel and restricting the movements of carriers when needed. Tools to evaluate the risk of individuals and groups of individuals contracting the disease could mitigate the growing anxiety and fear. The goal is to understand and analyze the nature of risk an individual would face when he/she comes in contact with a carrier. This thesis presents a tool that makes use of contextual data intelligence to predict the risk factor of individuals who come in contact with the carrier.

As vehicle manufacturers continue to increase their emphasis on safety with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), I propose a ubiquitous device that is able to analyze and advise on safety conditions. Mobile smartphones are increasing in popularity among younger generations with an estimated 64% of 25-34 year olds already using one in their daily lives. with over 10 million car accidents reported in the United States each year, car manufacturers have shifted their focus of a passive approach (airbags) to more active by adding features associated with ADAS (lane departure warnings). However, vehicles manufactured with these sensors are not economically priced while older vehicles might only have passive safety features. Given its accessibility and portability, I target a mobile smartphone as a device to compliment ADAS that can bring a driver assist to any vehicle without regards for any on-vehicle communication system requirements. I use the 3-axis accelerometer of multiple Android based smartphone to record and analyze various safety factors which can influence a driver while operating a vehicle. These influences with respect to the driver, vehicle and road are lane change maneuvers, vehicular comfort and road conditions. Each factor could potentially be hazardous to the health of the driver, …

In the United States, smartphone ownership surpassed 69.5 million in February 2011 with a large portion of those users (20%) downloading applications (apps) that enhance the usability of a device by adding additional functionality. a large percentage of apps are written specifically to utilize the geographical position of a mobile device. One of the prime factors in developing location prediction models is the use of historical data to train such a model. with larger sets of training data, prediction algorithms become more accurate; however, the use of historical data can quickly become a downfall if the GPS stream is not collected or processed correctly. Inaccurate or incomplete or even improperly interpreted historical data can lead to the inability to develop accurately performing prediction algorithms. As GPS chipsets become the standard in the ever increasing number of mobile devices, the opportunity for the collection of GPS data increases remarkably. the goal of this study is to build a comprehensive system that addresses the following challenges: (1) collection of GPS data streams in a manner such that the data is highly usable and has a reduction in errors; (2) processing and reduction of the collected data in order to prepare it and …

The increasingly popular cloud-computing paradigm provides on-demand access to computing and storage with the appearance of unlimited resources. Users are given access to a variety of data and software utilities to manage their work. Users rent virtual resources and pay for only what they use. In spite of the many benefits that cloud computing promises, the lack of dependability in shared virtualized infrastructures is a major obstacle for its wider adoption, especially for mission-critical applications. Virtualization and multi-tenancy increase system complexity and dynamicity. They introduce new sources of failure degrading the dependability of cloud computing systems. To assure cloud dependability, in my dissertation research, I develop autonomic failure identification and diagnosis techniques that are crucial for understanding emergent, cloud-wide phenomena and self-managing resource burdens for cloud availability and productivity enhancement. We study the runtime cloud performance data collected from a cloud test-bed and by using traces from production cloud systems. We define cloud signatures including those metrics that are most relevant to failure instances. We exploit profiled cloud performance data in both time and frequency domain to identify anomalous cloud behaviors and leverage cloud metric subspace analysis to automate the diagnosis of observed failures. We implement a prototype of the …

Article presents work on annotating reflections, an essential counselor behavioral code in motivational interviewing for psychotherapy on conversations that are a combination of casual and therapeutic dialogue.

Emergency Medical Dispatch Protocols are guidelines that a 9-1-1 dispatcher uses to evaluate the nature of emergency, resources to send and the nature of help provided to the 9-1-1 caller. The current Dispatch Protocols are based on voice only call. But the Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1) architecture will allow multimedia emergency calls. In this thesis I analyze and model the Emergency Medical Dispatch Protocols for NG9-1-1 architecture. I have identified various technical aspects to improve the NG9-1-1 Dispatch Protocols. The devices (smartphone) at the caller end have advanced to a point where they can be used to send and receive video, pictures and text. There are sensors embedded in them that can be used for initial diagnosis of the injured person. There is a need to improve the human computer (smartphone) interface to take advantage of technology so that callers can easily make use of various features available to them. The dispatchers at the 9-1-1 call center can make use of these new protocols to improve the quality and the response time. They will have capability of multiple media streams to interact with the caller and the first responders.The specific contributions in this thesis include developing applications that use smartphone …

This dissertation presents spatial partitioning algorithms to solve location-allocation problems. Location-allocations problems pertain to both the selection of facilities to serve demand at demand points and the assignment of demand points to the selected or known facilities. In the first part of this dissertation, we focus on the well known and well-researched location-allocation problem, the "p-median problem", which is a distance-based location-allocation problem that involves selection and allocation of p facilities for n demand points. We evaluate the performance of existing p-median heuristic algorithms and investigate the impact of the scale of the problem, and the spatial distribution of demand points on the performance of these algorithms. Based on the results from this comparative study, we present guidelines for location analysts to aid them in selecting the best heuristic and corresponding parameters depending on the problem at hand. Additionally, we found that existing heuristic algorithms are not suitable for solving large-scale p-median problems in a reasonable amount of time. We present a density-based decomposition methodology to solve large-scale p-median problems efficiently. This algorithm identifies dense clusters in the region and uses a MapReduce procedure to select facilities in the clustered regions independently and combine the solutions from the subproblems. Lastly, …

Post presented at Contagion 2016, a satellite meeting at the 2016 Conference on Complex Systems. This poster presents a stochastic agent-based model that simulates the transmission of ZIKA via mosquitoes in 11 islands in the French Polynesia.

Automatic text summarization and keyphrase extraction are two interesting areas of research which extend along natural language processing and information retrieval. They have recently become very popular because of their wide applicability. Devising generic techniques for these tasks is challenging due to several issues. Yet we have a good number of intelligent systems performing the tasks. As different systems are designed with different perspectives, evaluating their performances with a generic strategy is crucial. It has also become immensely important to evaluate the performances with minimal human effort. In our work, we focus on designing a relativized scale for evaluating different algorithms. This is our major contribution which challenges the traditional approach of working with an absolute scale. We consider the impact of some of the environment variables (length of the document, references, and system-generated outputs) on the performance. Instead of defining some rigid lengths, we show how to adjust to their variations. We prove a mathematically sound baseline that should work for all kinds of documents. We emphasize automatically determining the syntactic well-formedness of the structures (sentences). We also propose defining an equivalence class for each unit (e.g. word) instead of the exact string matching strategy. We show an evaluation …

The purpose of this project is to explore the GPU for general purpose computing. The GPU is a massively parallel computing device that has a high-throughput, exhibits high arithmetic intensity, has a large market presence, and with the increasing computation power being added to it each year through innovations, the GPU is a perfect candidate to complement the CPU in performing computations. The GPU follows the single instruction multiple data (SIMD) model for applying operations on its data. This model allows the GPU to be very useful for assisting the CPU in performing computations on data that is highly parallel in nature. The compute unified device architecture (CUDA) is a parallel computing and programming platform for NVIDIA GPUs. The main focus of this project is to show the power, speed, and performance of a CUDA-enabled GPU for digital video watermark insertion in the H.264 video compression domain. Digital video watermarking in general is a highly computationally intensive process that is strongly dependent on the video compression format in place. The H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video compression format has high compression efficiency at the expense of having high computational complexity and leaving little room for an imperceptible watermark to be inserted. Employing a …

Insider threat is one of the greatest concerns for information security that could cause more significant financial losses and damages than any other attack. However, implementing an efficient detection system is a very challenging task. It has long been recognized that solutions to insider threats are mainly user-centric and several psychological and psychosocial models have been proposed. A user's psychophysiological behavior measures can provide an excellent source of information for detecting user's malicious behaviors and mitigating insider threats. In this dissertation, we propose a multi-modal framework based on the user's psychophysiological measures and computer-based behaviors to distinguish between a user's behaviors during regular activities versus malicious activities. We utilize several psychophysiological measures such as electroencephalogram (EEG), electrocardiogram (ECG), and eye movement and pupil behaviors along with the computer-based behaviors such as the mouse movement dynamics, and keystrokes dynamics to build our framework for detecting malicious insiders. We conduct human subject experiments to capture the psychophysiological measures and the computer-based behaviors for a group of participants while performing several computer-based activities in different scenarios. We analyze the behavioral measures, extract useful features, and evaluate their capability in detecting insider threats. We investigate each measure separately, then we use data fusion techniques …

While pragmatics, through its integration of situational awareness and real world relevant knowledge, offers a high level of analysis that is suitable for real interpretation of natural dialogue, semantics, on the other end, represents a lower yet more tractable and affordable linguistic level of analysis using current technologies. Generally, the understanding of semantic meaning in literature has revolved around the famous quote ``You shall know a word by the company it keeps''. In this thesis we investigate the role of context constituents in decoding the semantic meaning of the engulfing context; specifically we probe the role of salient concepts, defined as content-bearing expressions which afford encyclopedic definitions, as a suitable source of semantic clues to an unambiguous interpretation of context. Furthermore, we integrate this world knowledge in building a new and robust unsupervised semantic model and apply it to entail semantic relatedness between textual pairs, whether they are words, sentences or paragraphs. Moreover, we explore the abstraction of semantics across languages and utilize our findings into building a novel multi-lingual semantic relatedness model exploiting information acquired from various languages. We demonstrate the effectiveness and the superiority of our mono-lingual and multi-lingual models through a comprehensive set of evaluations on specialized …

In this article, I introduce a novel airborne network mobility model, called the Smooth Turn Mobility Model, that captures the correlation of acceleration for airborne vehicles across time and spatial coordinates. E?ective routing in airborne networks (ANs) relies on suitable mobility models that capture the random movement pattern of airborne vehicles. As airborne vehicles cannot make sharp turns as easily as ground vehicles do, the widely used mobility models for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks such as Random Waypoint and Random Direction models fail. Our model is realistic in capturing the tendency of airborne vehicles toward making straight trajectory and smooth turns with large radius, and whereas is simple enough for tractable connectivity analysis and routing design.

Biological emergency response planning plays a critical role in protecting the public from possible devastating results of sudden disease outbreaks. These plans describe the distribution of medical countermeasures across a region using limited resources within a restricted time window. Thus, the ability to determine that such a plan will be feasible, i.e. successfully provide service to affected populations within the time limit, is crucial. Many of the current efforts to validate plans are in the form of live drills and training, but those may not test plan activation at the appropriate scale or with sufficient numbers of participants. Thus, this necessitates the use of computational resources to aid emergency managers and planners in developing and evaluating plans before they must be used. Current emergency response plan generation software packages such as RE-PLAN or RealOpt, provide rate-based validation analyses. However, these types of analysis may neglect details of real-world traffic dynamics. Therefore, this dissertation presents Validating Emergency Response Plan Execution Through Simulation (VERPETS), a novel, computational system for the agent-based simulation of biological emergency response plan activation. This system converts raw road network, population distribution, and emergency response plan data into a format suitable for simulation, and then performs these simulations …

Globally distributed software teams are widespread throughout industry. But finding reliable methods that can properly assess a team's activities is a real challenge. Methods such as surveys and manual coding of activities are too time consuming and are often unreliable. Recent advances in information retrieval and linguistics, however, suggest that automated and/or semi-automated text classification algorithms could be an effective way of finding differences in the communication patterns among individuals and groups. Communication among group members is frequent and generates a significant amount of data. Thus having a web-based tool that can automatically analyze the communication patterns among global software teams could lead to a better understanding of group performance. The goal of this thesis, therefore, is to compare automatic and semi-automatic measures of communication and evaluate their effectiveness in classifying different types of group activities that occur within a global software development project. In order to achieve this goal, we developed a web-based component that can be used to help clean and classify communication activities. The component was then used to compare different automated text classification techniques on various group activities to determine their effectiveness in correctly classifying data from a global software development team project.

With the advent of information explosion age, larger capacity disk drives are used to store data and powerful devices are used to process big data. As the scale and complexity of computer systems increase, we expect these systems to provide dependable and energy-efficient services and computation. Although hard drives are reliable in general, they are the most commonly replaced hardware components. Disk failures cause data corruption and even data loss, which can significantly affect system performance and financial losses. In this dissertation research, I analyze different manifestations of disk failures in production data centers and explore data mining techniques combined with statistical analysis methods to discover categories of disk failures and their distinctive properties. I use similarity measures to quantify the degradation process of each failure type and derive the degradation signature. The derived degradation signatures are further leveraged to forecast when future disk failures may happen. Meanwhile, this dissertation also studies energy efficiency of high performance computers. Specifically, I characterize the power and energy consumption of Haswell processors which are used in multiple supercomputers, and analyze the power and energy consumption of Legion, a data-centric programming model and runtime system, and Legion applications. We find that power and energy …

POD (Point of Dispensing)-based emergency response plans involving mass prophylaxis may seem feasible when considering the choice of dispensing points within a region, overall population density, and estimated traffic demands. However, the plan may fail to serve particular vulnerable sub-populations, resulting in access disparities during emergency response. Federal authorities emphasize on the need to identify sub-populations that cannot avail regular services during an emergency due to their special needs to ensure effective response. Vulnerable individuals require the targeted allocation of appropriate resources to serve their special needs. Devising schemes to address the needs of vulnerable sub-populations is essential for the effectiveness of response plans. This research focuses on data-driven computational methods to quantify and address vulnerabilities in response plans that require the allocation of targeted resources. Data-driven methods to identify and quantify vulnerabilities in response plans are developed as part of this research. Addressing vulnerabilities requires the targeted allocation of appropriate resources to PODs. The problem of resource allocation to PODs during public health emergencies is introduced and the variants of the resource allocation problem such as the spatial allocation, spatio-temporal allocation and optimal resource subset variants are formulated. Generating optimal resource allocation and scheduling solutions can be computationally hard …

Epidemics have caused major human and monetary losses through the course of human civilization. It is very important that epidemiologists and public health personnel are prepared to handle an impending infectious disease outbreak. the ever-changing demographics, evolving infrastructural resources of geographic regions, emerging and re-emerging diseases, compel the use of simulation to predict disease dynamics. By the means of simulation, public health personnel and epidemiologists can predict the disease dynamics, population groups at risk and their geographic locations beforehand, so that they are prepared to respond in case of an epidemic outbreak. As a consequence of the large numbers of individuals and inter-personal interactions involved in simulating infectious disease spread in a region such as a county, sizeable amounts of data may be produced that have to be analyzed. Methods to visualize this data would be effective in facilitating people from diverse disciplines understand and analyze the simulation. This thesis proposes a framework to simulate and visualize the spread of an infectious disease in a population of a region such as a county. As real-world populations have a non-homogeneous demographic and spatial distribution, this framework models the spread of an infectious disease based on population of and geographic distance between …

Researchers have been involved for decades in search of an efficient skin detection method. Yet current methods have not overcome the major limitations. To overcome these limitations, in this dissertation, a clustering and region growing based skin detection method is proposed. These methods together with a significant insight result in a more effective algorithm. The insight concerns a capability to define dynamically the number of clusters in a collection of pixels organized as an image. In clustering for most problem domains, the number of clusters is fixed a priori and does not perform effectively over a wide variety of data contents. Therefore, in this dissertation, a skin detection method has been proposed using the above findings and validated. This method assigns the number of clusters based on image properties and ultimately allows freedom from manual thresholding or other manual operations. The dynamic determination of clustering outcomes allows for greater automation of skin detection when dealing with uncertain real-world conditions.

In this dissertation, we present a number of studies that primarily focus on data movement challenges among different types of memories (viz., 3D-DRAM, DDRx DRAM and NVM) employed together as a flat-address heterogeneous memory system. We introduce two different hardware-based techniques for prefetching data from slow off-chip phase change memory (PCM) to fast on-chip memories. The prefetching techniques efficiently fetch data from PCM and place that data into processor-resident or 3D-DRAM-resident buffers without putting high demand on bandwidth and provide significant performance improvements. Next, we explore different page migration techniques for flat-address memory systems which differ in when to migrate pages (i.e., periodically or instantaneously) and how to manage the migrations (i.e., OS-based or hardware-based approach). In the first page migration study, we present several epoch-based page migration policies for different organizations of flat-address memories consisting of two (2-level) and three (3-level) types of memory modules. These policies have resulted in significant energy savings. In the next page migration study, we devise an efficient "on-the-fly'" page migration technique which migrates a page from slow PCM to fast 3D-DRAM whenever it receives a certain number of memory accesses without waiting for any specific time interval. Furthermore, we present a light-weight hardware-assisted …

Software applications’ performance is hindered by a variety of factors, but most notably by the well-known CPU-memory speed gap (often known as the memory wall). This results in the CPU sitting idle waiting for data to be brought from memory to processor caches. The addressing used by caches cause non-uniform accesses to various cache sets. The non-uniformity is due to several reasons, including how different objects are accessed by the code and how the data objects are located in memory. Memory allocators determine where dynamically created objects are placed, thus defining addresses and their mapping to cache locations. It is important to evaluate how different allocators behave with respect to the localities of the created objects. Most allocators use a single attribute, the size, of an object in making allocation decisions. Additional attributes such as the placement with respect to other objects, or specific cache area may lead to better use of cache memories. In this dissertation, we proposed and implemented a framework that allows for the development and evaluation of new memory allocation techniques. At the root of the framework is a memory tracing tool called Gleipnir, which provides very detailed information about every memory access, and relates it …

We have a huge amount of video data from extensively available surveillance cameras and increasingly growing technology to record the motion of a moving object in the form of trajectory data. With proliferation of location-enabled devices and ongoing growth in smartphone penetration as well as advancements in exploiting image processing techniques, tracking moving objects is more flawlessly achievable. In this work, we explore some domain-independent qualitative and quantitative features in raw trajectory (spatio-temporal) data in videos captured by a fixed single wide-angle view camera sensor in outdoor areas. We study the efficacy of those features in classifying four basic high level actions by employing two supervised learning algorithms and show how each of the features affect the learning algorithms’ overall accuracy as a single factor or confounded with others.

Mobile phone advancements and ubiquitous internet connectivity are resulting in ever expanding possibilities in the application of smart phones. Users of mobile phones are now capable of hosting server applications from their personal devices. Whether providing services individually or in an ad hoc network setting the devices are currently not configured for defending against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks, often launched from a botnet, have existed in the space of personal computing for decades but recently have begun showing up on mobile devices. Research is done first into the required steps to develop a potential botnet on the Android platform. This includes testing for the amount of malicious traffic an Android phone would be capable of generating for a DDoS attack. On the other end of the spectrum is the need of mobile devices running networked applications to develop security against DDoS attacks. For this mobile, phones are setup, with web servers running Apache to simulate users running internet connected applications for either local ad hoc networks or serving to the internet. Testing is done for the viability of using commonly available modules developed for Apache and intended for servers as well as finding baseline capabilities of …